Every day, the Internet gives birth to 60,000 new websites, over 40 million Tumblr posts, and throws 27 million unique pages at you across various social networks. Trying to “stumble upon” new content is one way to get through the mess. But Sitesimon, a brand new New York City startup believes content needs to find you, not the other way around.
Following a summer of heated incubation at Entrepreneur Roundtable’s Accelerator program in New York’s Time Square, Sitesimon is launching its new social browsing tool that makes it easy to find and enjoy new content online. Users can share their browsing and be recognized for discovering sites that others like too.
The add-on tool works in Chrome by privately combing and analyzing your browsing history. It then shows you only content you haven’t seen before but that you’re likely to enjoy. Recommendations are shown on the main page alongside a stream of web content shared by other Sitesimon user. Connections on Twitter and Facebook will be coming at the end of this week. CEO and co-founder Steve Gutentag says they definitely plan to add sending to and pulling content from Google+ soon.
“Think of it like Gmail’s Priority Inbox‟, but for browsing the web,” says Gutentag. “We pull out the articles, videos, and other content that you care about but haven‟t seen yet, while also aggregating the content curated by the people you care about and cataloging it for when you have the time and want a serendipitous discovery experience.”
The browser add-on also works like a traditional sharing tool and is very similar in functionality to Voyurl, another New York City startup that emphasizes turning your browsing history into beautiful visualizations as well as handing you customized browsing recommendations.
“While we both use browser extensions and analyze people’s activities passively, we think that’s where most of the similarities end,” says Gutentag. Sitesimon focuses exclusively on content discovery and personalized recommendations and says it’s “reinvented how users approach content discovery and emphasize both targeted recommendations and serendipitous discovery.” Gutentag also believes the user experience of the two extensions are different, with Sitesimon focusing its extension on sharing content people enjoy and Voyurl’s focusing on linking back to personal analytics.
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Sitesimon says privacy is its #1 concern and notes that it’s 100% opt-in – if you do not have or are not logged-in to the browser add-on, Sitesimon does not capture any data. Also, unless you actively share something, nothing you browse is ever made public. All browsing data is stored in an encrypted database and is completely private. As a default, secure webpages (https) and any known adult sides are not recorded in its data base.
Sitesimon is a member of New York City’s ER Accelerator first class of 10 startups and is about to present in front of investors and press this Friday at ERA’s official demo day. We’ll be there to report. And if you’re interested in checking out the beta product, sign up at Sitesimon.
The company has already raised $500K earlier from angel investors Ken Cron (Former CEO, Vivendi Universal Games; Former President, CMP Media), John Ason (early investor in
Diapers.com/Soap.com, Ology.com, and Hotlist.com), and Samer Hamadeh (Co-Founder,
Vault.com and Zeel.com; Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners).
Featured image: Shutterstock/seawhisper
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